Robert Kelly Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly is perhaps the most prolific major poet in contemporary American literature. He is also one of the country's most respected shortfiction writers and teachers of creative writing. The founder of three distinguished literary magazines--Chelsea Review, Trobar, and Matter--he has also been a contributing editor to such respected journals as Conjunctions, Caterpillar, Los, Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics , and Sulfur. Associated with Bard College for more than thirty-five years, Kelly has been the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature since 1986. In the early 1980s he became known as a skillful and creative administrator as he helped to organize the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts," a program that serves as a model for other M.F.A. programs that wish to avoid academic rigidity in developing the artistic capabilities of their students. In the 4 October 1992 New York Times Anthony DePalma named Kelly, along with poet John Ashbery, composer Joan Tower, and African novelist Chinua Achebe, one of the "stars" that Bard College "is ablaze with."

Most important, though, is that Kelly is a cofounder along with the poet Jerome Rothenberg of what has come to be recognized as a uniquely American school of poets who at first chose to identify their concerns as the poetry of Deep Image.

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